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Fantasy Analytics (Part 1)

Back in mid-August, The Indianapolis Business Journalran a story about Fantasy Football Leagues and employer fears about their impact on productivity. Among the interesting stats:

37 million Americans spend about an hour a week at work managing their make-believe teams

Employers lose up to $1.1 billion a week in lower productivity

The article included lots of information and advice on what employers can do to reduce Fantasy Football-related distraction infractions. A personal favorite, a warning about how allowing FF in the workplace could leave companies vulnerable to discrimination lawsuits.

A comment about web and email monitoring by employers caught my eye as well: “Eighty percent of companies already electronically monitor their employees in some way.” So, New England Patriots head coach Bill Belicheck isn’t the only one cheating by stealing signals from the competition! If your boss has a team and it’s doing better than yours every week, find out what spy tool he or she is using to monitor your moves.

I found the furor over fantasy mostly amusing until about ten days ago when I accompanied my partners on a sales call. The purpose of the meeting was to discuss a web site overhaul. “What should we do? Where should we start?”

Our prospect’s ice breaker, the first half of the meeting, was talking about – you guessed it – fantasy football. Thirty minutes of line-up analyzers, waiver wire and trade challenges, injury reports, sleepers and snoozers. One person in the conference room admitted that they spent five or six hours a week working on their imaginary team.

I finally asked, “How much time do you spend on web analytics every week?”

“Huh?”

Translation: I spend five hours a week analyzing fantasy football results; I don’t spend five minutes a week analyzing the results of my online advertising and marketing programs.

Analytics is not for everyone. I know that. Yet I couldn’t help wondering why someone would spend so much time and money on fantasy football but never dream of spending equal amounts of time and money on their own business. Again, we’re talking about 5-6 hours per week.

Bottom line: fantasy is fun, reality isn’t.

But in reality, if you’re not in the analytics game, you can bet that your competition is, and they’re throwing you for a loss.

In Part 2, learn how to make web analytics as fun as fantasy football. It may not lead you to fame, but it could make you a fortune.